Pestilence in Abyssinia: A Novella

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Twice divorced and often lonely, sixty-three-year-old Robert Caanen is a member of a small international contingent of physicians sent to help Ethiopians initiate antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of AIDS. He’s assigned to a clinic in Dessie, a city northeast of Addis. It’s only two hundred miles by road, but nine hours of driving due to the appalling road conditions. Dessie has a storied past in Ethiopia’s history.

Like so much of Ethiopia, the hospital seems frozen in time, but it has already enrolled more than 3,000 patients, the vast majority of them from rural areas without electricity, water, or an address. It’s Caanen’s job to mentor the doctors in the art and science of HIV patient care.

He meets and befriends fellow volunteer Floyd Handel. Together, the two men encounter the beauty as well as the ugliness of this backward and impoverished country, enduring the frustrations of trying to deliver health care in spite of self-serving NGOs, a lack of resources, and ignorance of HIV.